Tag Archives: Lord Coe

We are all looking back on 2012 as the year when the UK has been said to lead the way in a number of areas – the Olympics, Sir Bradley Wiggins and the Tour de France, Murray and the US Open, James Bond and the Queen, with Danny Boyle wrapping it all up to show the UK on the side of good.

But, like every nation, we are not just the nice guys. The UK has also become better known internationally for bribery and bank irregularities (LIBOR fixing, money laundering for terrorists), the Leveson inquiry into the press and phone hacking, the indictment of our police over Hillsborough, alleged police wrongdoing that led to a cabinet minister resigning (Andrew Mitchell) and Jimmy Savile reminding us all of what this country was like just recently.

So, 2012 has been a very strange year for the UK – a “curate’s egg” of a year. Monocle Magazine (itself named after an eyepiece that was popular in the 19th Century) rated the UK the world’s top “Soft Power” in 2012 as a result of the Olympics, Murray’s tennis feats and James Bond (among other things). Yet, at the same time, our banks are being shown up for massive failures on LIBOR, HSBC’s lack of control and willingness to allow money laundering on an exceptional scale and the recent Rolls Royce bribery allegations.

The UK is home to amazing ideals and potential: from sports stars and a tremendous passion for sport, home of democratic freedoms, a country based on welcoming the world to its shores and an internationalism based on a long-lost Empire and a need to be important but be seen to be doing the right thing; an independent spirit that makes us not want to be subsumed in Europe or the USA but to straddle the middle and be all things to all.

The UK is also home to the World Wildlife Fund and to a host of NGO’s and charities that see the UK as the centre of the struggle for the world to be a better place. Our aid programme (directed by DfID) is well-meaning even if sometimes misguided (recent nonsense in Rwanda being a good example).

Yet, business and financial irregularity brings our self-righteousness back to earth with a bump. While we may be able to export a high degree of soft power through our great sporting and artistic talents, a nation like the UK has to be wary that its reputation is not completely destroyed by letting our ancient mercantile and trading instincts come first. Sometimes we don’t know if we are on the side of James Bond or SMERSH.

Britain’s “export” trade

The UK was a mercantile nation well before becoming the first into the Industrial Age and its Empire was established on the back of pioneering instincts and a trading mentality – heavily mixed with politics and ownership. Our wealth was built on the back of exploration and an eye for what sold well – whether it was gold or slaves.

Whereas the Chinese and its tributary system did not seek to rule the countries with which it traded, the UK sought vertical integration through Empire. It exported its laws, its systems, its language and its instincts throughout the world – the good and the bad. Writers like Niall Ferguson have debated whether, on balance, the British Empire has done good or bad overall, but, like the apology being demanded currently for Turing, this is history. As AN Wilson so majestically says in “The Elizabethans”, it is hard for us to look back on that age with the eyes and experience of the 21st Century.

What matters today are the after-effects of the actions taken and also in the actions being taken today along with the belief systems that are current. While Monocle may be right that we export some good and reap some soft power, the UK also exports some bad that may well negate the soft power that we so want to aspire to at a time when the West’s economic power is diminishing fast. Joseph Nye calls the mix of soft and hard powers, our overall “smart power” and we are in danger of losing the “smarts”

When Transparency International – UK was setting up its “Defence against Corruption” project and I was an adviser to them, a great deal of discussion took place about how corruption has three legs – the corrupted (the government and individuals who were bribed), the corruptor (usually a company that did the corrupting) and the nation where the corruptor was based.

Much of the discussion around TI’s Corruption Perception Index is about the first, but the latter two are as much party to the corruption as the corrupted.

When Jack Straw originally produced his white paper which ended with the introduction of the Bribery Act (a very late addition to the codifying of our laws and the subject of many years fighting between NGO’s and companies as well as between the UK government and OECD – where we had signed up to the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention many years before), he pointed out that the UK was a relatively bribery-free nation.

It is true that since the times of Samuel Pepys (when anything could be bought through bribery) the UK has cleaned up its act at home. As we became wealthier, we became less corrupt (although there remain many instances of bribery and corruption still).

However, in some ways we became more Confucian – we were most obsessed with doing right at home and exported our worst sins overseas. Companies from the UK in many industries such as energy, construction and aerospace and defence bribed for business. As the recent ITV programme “Exposure” aired on 10th October, 2012 showed, bribery by British firms overseas remains too common despite the Bribery Act. Rolls Royce is accused of two major acts of corruption in Indonesia and China dating back several years. It will have to show that its systems and policies are now consistent with the Bribery Act requirements or staff could be held culpable.

National reputation – national character

In the defence industry, the cry was always “If we don’t bribe, the French will”. The Chinese and Russians may be the chief bribing competitors these days but we have now enacted the Bribery Act – so, by law the exporting of bribery by companies from the UK should be at an end – including any company that does any business in the UK.

Maybe the issues that have been uncovered at Rolls Royce are old news but many concerns persist and suggest that the short-term gain mentality remains. In a posting from October I reported on a Financial Times article (from a survey by FTI Consulting) that showed a third of board members in the UK would bribe if they felt it was needed to win business. This worrying statistic shows clearly that the UK’s soft power base is in danger.

Our 2012 national reputation was portrayed in Danny Boyle’s Olympics opening ceremony as quirky but unselfconscious; a nation of tremendous artistic, scientific, engineering and business success, caring and cultured. Ai Weiwei summed it up well in an article in the Guardian (it is well worth reading the whole article:

“Brilliant. It was very, very well done. This was about Great Britain; it didn’t pretend it was trying to have global appeal. Because Great Britain has self-confidence, it doesn’t need a monumental Olympics.”

This was a characteristic portrayed throughout 2012 – a year when our sporting achievements have been at their highest in athletics, in golf (along with the rest of Europe), in tennis, in cycling and in cricket (we even beat New Zealand at rugby). Only in football (our national sport) has a less than successful and a less than wholesome image been portrayed.

But, maybe this is where the link may be. Football has become a huge business and business has no ethics of its own – we are continuously told that companies have no souls (as tax avoiders such as Google, Starbucks, Amazon and the rest show clearly). Football was a working class sport but is now a multi-billion pound successful business. Its sporting soul has disappeared as our exports grow – its “self-confidence” becoming mere hubris.

Soft power and hard exports

It could be said that football has not suffered yet along with its financial success (it still has its fan base). It took someone like Lord Coe to defeat the doomsayers that forecast the Olympics in London, with its huge corporate branding, would go the same way but it was a success with real people. Football remains hugely popular but the corruption in FIFA allied to racism at football grounds in Eastern Europe and the huge pay gap between the performers (being paid £20,000 and upward per week) and the fans means that its brand is continuously being corrupted.

If, in the age of smart power, if it is to be a continuing success, brand UK has to be clear and focused, not tainted by bad business ethics. It means not just abiding by the rules of international business but setting the standards – to take advantage of the good will that has been gained in 2012.

This means swapping the short-term (unreal) benefits of poor, 19th trading standards (where bribery and corruption was rife) to set real standards that are enshrined in the 2011 Bribery Act but where the UK has not put in the resources to implement the Act, where the US has shown a willingness to prosecute its own malfeasants in a way that shames successive UK governments.

Soft Power has to become (to use Nye’s term) smart power. Smart power is the ability to take advantage of the benefits that come from our leadership in key areas and to trade on them. Danny Boyle (through the Olympics opening ceremony and his refusal of a knighthood) shows the way away from the 19th Century mercantilistic British norms to a UK that has the ability to lead the world with its soft power allied to economic and political capabilities. This means waking up to what the 21st Century could mean – a global economy where improved communications can kill a business in progressively much shorter times as well as upsetting the benefits that the likes of Tolkein (The Hobbit is a classic British tale) and Fleming and the rest have provided to the country as a whole.

It means being self-confident enough to be seen to espouse good business not business at any price or any cost. There was no government reaction to the FT report cited above. There should have been. Doing good business is becoming the next stage of capitalism – we should be at its forefront as the challenge of the Chinese and others (who aspire less to this cause than the vocalized western consensus since WWII) grow: good business rather than bad business.

This is a hard ask in the depths of recession – but, if the UK is to capitalize on its soft power base, then a UK for the 21st Century has to be built on a smart power base – rather than simply going soft.